ObamaCare loses heart
You can read the Bloomberg article for yourself:
Cardiologists Crying Foul Over Obama Medicare Cuts
I want to draw your attention to these excerpts:
Obama and his allies in Congress are pushing to extend coverage to the 46 million Americans without health insurance, at a potential cost of $1 trillion over a decade. The separate Medicare proposal, announced July 1, slashes projected spending for care by cardiologists and oncologists by more than 10 percent each, while paying family doctors 8 percent more and nurses an additional 7 percent.
The cuts would be “impossible” for some small-town cardiologists who rely on Medicare patients, said Zia Roshandel, a heart doctor in Culpeper, Virginia. The town of 10,000 people is about 60 miles southwest of Washington.
Roshandel and two partners see perhaps 50 patients a day at his practice, the local hospital and a community clinic for the indigent, the 40-year-old said in a telephone interview. Medicare accounts for two-thirds of their clientele, he said.
Already squeezed by government and private insurers, Roshandel said he has cut office hours, forgone paychecks and shifted his 12 workers to a high-deductible insurance plan over the past two years. The latest proposal would push him out of private practice altogether, most likely to a hospital in a larger community less reliant on Medicare, he said.
And here’s the rub of single-government-payer. One-size-fits-all is doomed to fail, because there is no universal intelligence or bureaucrat that can properly allocate resources with the same efficiencies as a free market. In this case, the doctor will have to pick up and leave his patients behind, because the system rewards his being part of a larger collective practice in a bigger community.
That also ignores the other conundrum of the healthcare debate: if you do succeed in shifting resources to preventative care, you simply create a larger population of people who will eventually succumb to heart disease and cancer. Unless you decide to ration, restricting access to only the young…
